Water efficiency and resilience of fruit production in South Africa

The project “Increasing resilience to water-related risks in the UK fresh fruit and vegetable system”, led by Cranfield University, is funded through the Global Food Security’s ‘Resilience of the UK Food System Programme’. The project interrogates water efficiency over successive droughts at a farm, catchment and national level and how this relates to resilience of fresh fruit and water in South Africa. The project hypothesises that the resilience of an individual producer has improved but the basin-wide, land-water-crop system is more vulnerable to drought shocks and that much can be done to enhance resilience at this wider scale.

Start date October 2016 | End date September 2019

The following blogs report on project findings:

When Water gives you Lemons

Cape Water Crisis/UK Fruit System

UEA team

Professor Bruce Lankford, UEA Principal Investigator

Partners

Cranfield University (Project Leader)

UEA

NIAB EMR (formerly East Malling Research)

University of Oxford

Funders

BBSRC Global Food Security’s ‘Resilience of the UK Food System Programme’